Where do you buy pine for making interior trim

[Wes Billups]

I'm in the process of slowly upgrading all the interior trim in my house. Wife and I like some locally available baseboard and casing but it's $1.20-$1.40/ft. I can buy 1x4 select pine at the local big box for $0.50/ft. With the volume of trim I'm needing I can justify a moulder and knives pretty easily with these lumber prices.

My question is, those with moulders, where do you buy your lumber? I'd also be interested to know if you buy it S4S or a more rough form.

We're pretty set on pine as we are remodeling the house in stages and the existing woodwork is pine.

Love to hear any other input/suggestions from those that have run quite a bit of trim.

Thanks,
Wes Billups

[John A langley]

Wes try Liberty hardwoods in Kansas City , also have a retail store called Metro

[Jim Dwight]

I wouldn't want to help you avoid buying a tool but I found the pricing of trim at a lumber yard was very different from the price of the same trim at Home Depot or Lowe's. Nearly half the price at the lumber yard and also came in 16 and 17 foot lengths (baseboard and casing respectively) for less waste. So you might want to check. That price doesn't look bad.

About 20 years ago I made three piece crown for our Pittsburgh house. I did only the living room and dining room. I used shelving boards from the home center. It worked but was a LOT of work. Even with good knives and a good setup you still need to sand the trim after moulding it. That is laborious. If you can buy what you need ready for finishing and installation, I would definitely go that way. If you really want to make it, I would look around for a way to buy rough cut pine if that's what you want. But it will gum up your knives. I love the smell but it isn't the easiest to work with. I kind of like installing trim but I am only doing paint grade trim. And it still frustrates me sometimes. Walls are not plumb or don't meet at right angles. With clear finish trim, you can't just smear caulk in the joint and paint it. Installation will be plenty of work. Making the trim could be too much.

[Peter Quinn]

I can't advise where to buy lumber in your area, but I will suggest you add up al your costs and consider your motivation in this endeavor. All in, you're not likely to be saving much at those prices. For moldings you want to start with a good quality s4s, often the 50 cent per lineal stuff is split on a straight line and planed quick, edges are not presentation quality. Verify that. Once you surface/sand both edges , buy a molder, buy the knives, learn to use it ( that's the fun part), get rid of the incredible volume of waste......for stock trim its a wash in most cases. I do this professionally, and have a molder in the home shop....the ONLY time I make moldings is when we can't buy them, due to profile, species, time constraints. Etc. the custom moldings wind up costing more, not less. There may be a value for you in looking around your beautiful home and thinking "I did that!", that's enough for some guys, certainly valid as long as you go into this eyes wide open.

[Tom M King]

I really miss the days when I could go to a supplier and get 3/4 or one inch boards, C and Better completely clear, well cured and stable, in any width from four to twelve, and any length up to sixteen feet, as well as all sorts of other profiles in stock too. The big box stores put all those guys out of business, and the last one I dealt with closed and had a big auction in the early '90s.

[Stan Calow]

Wes give Schutte Lumber in KC on Southwest Blvd a call. They might have an option for you.

[Joe Jensen]

I doubt the 1 by 4 select pine at the big box will be stable enough to work as trim. Suggestion, buy a piece and rip it in half to see what happens.

Also commercial suppliers will have a great price on real trim. I paid $1.10 a for some very fancy paint grade poplar, 3/4" thick and 4" tall.

[Jim Andrew]

I bought a router bit from MLCS to make some casing and base. Ran it in my shaper with power feeder to avoid burning.

[Lee Reep]

Wes,

Are you painting the trim? If so, maybe pine is OK, but we have Andersen pine trim, and I hate it. Dented really easily, when our kids were young and banging toys into baseboard or door surround trim. It also is less than ideal for taking stain. I redid our powder room, and went with alder. It matches our doors, which I think may be alder, and not pine. I am lucky because we have an incredible lumber store in town that has a mill shop that makes hundreds of trim profiles in numerous wood species. Staining the alder trim was incredibly easy, and looks very uniform. (Our home was built in the 80s and has pretty dark stain on 6-panel doors and trim. Our doors look great, but the pine trim looks pretty bad after 30 years.)

But even if you go with pine, at the prices you quoted, you are probably going to have to mill well over a 1000 feet of trim to break even or save money. That is a LOT of milling! Also, if you want to match commercial trim, you need to mill on both sides -- the back of most commercial trim has a relief on it down the middle so it sits better on the wall. And finally, if you are looking at pine 1X4s, then you will have much thicker trim than commercial trim. Unless you want thick trim, you will need to plane it to a thinner profile, since you will likely fight getting 1X4s to fit tight on walls.

You have the opportunity to do something really custom, and really nice, but it sounds like way too much work -- at least for me. :)

[roger wiegand]

If you're painting I'd strongly suggest poplar rather than pine. Way easier to work with and quite likely cheaper. I'm just in the middle of installing about 400 ft of a four piece built up painted poplar baseboard in my upstairs -- it is a lot of work, no doubt; this is the last phase, the downstairs got all cherry baseboard, window and door trim. I spent months cutting, sanding, and prefinishing thousands of feet of material. It looks stunning (to me anyway), but I'm not sure I'd volunteer to do it again.

The big advantage of DIY molding is that you don't have to put up with the crappy skinny stuff with all of the detail sanded off that most lumberyards and big box stores provide. You can make much beefier profiles with distinct details and reveals that look 1000% better. Adding even 1/8" in thickness can help enormously. If you want to match commercial trim DIY makes little sense, the point for me was to have something much better.

[Mel Fulks]

I like poplar too,if you have a decent supplier. I've worked couple places that would not buy poplar because they bought
based on price only and so the poplar they had seen was so warped,crooked,twisted,and bowed that when they cut the
bundle bands ...there were explosions! Good flat poplar is available. Easier to paint ,too,since you don't get those sap spots. And cheaper than any pine worth having.

[roger wiegand]

Stock I bought from CWG Hardwood near Hartford CT was fabulous. Huge stocks of many species on hand. Superb service and extremely cooperative in custom milling of some of what I needed and pulling lumber that met my needs-- for example when I asked for 450 ft of 4-1/2" wide S4S cherry with one face and one edge all red the response was "no problem". (Compared to a more expensive a large midwestern supplier who wouldn't give me any estimate of what fraction of the boards in his stock were all heartwood on one face, and would make absolutely no commitment about what he would deliver). I had a vanishingly small amount of waste in the wood they sent. It's an hour and a half away, but my new favorite lumber source near Boston. Highly recommended.

[Alex Stace]

I go to the lumberyard down the road and buy it fresh from the kiln. nice to live in Maine if you like pine

[joe milana]

Wes, Go Pacific mutual door in Kansas City. It's right behind Schutte (which I avoid like the plague). They have just about any molding you could imagine. Prices are good, and they will sell you one piece, or one million. They have a molding chart on their webpage. If they can't help you, liberty hardwoods in will do custom molding for a reasonable price. There is a knife charge, a setup charge, but it's not too bad.

[Rich Riddle]

In Kansas City, I always went to Paxton Lumber or Sweet Lumber on Southwest Boulevard.

[Rick Potter]

+1 on buying it from a supplier. As others have said, my house trim was less than half of what big box stores were charging.

My last house, I made all the oak crown molding from scratch....never again. First, you have so much waste. For 4 3/4" crown, I bought the closest widths that I could and lost at least an inch or more on all of it since most of the boards were 6" or so. Then, I had to cut out all the bad spots, splits, knots, etc. I aged it for at least a month and some of it bowed so badly it was unuseable. My dad had an RBI molder, and custom cutter, and helped me with the cutting. Then sanding took time. By the time I was done, I still had some lengths that were bowed enough I had to use screws in a couple spots to keep it from twisting. I still had some pieces I would not have bought because of grain. I think I would have saved money if I had just bought it.

[David Kumm]

I do my own molding because I use different species but it isn't to save $$. Too much work but the result is good. As to pine, I'd avoid it as pine boards are likely dried to 14-18% rather than the 8-10% you want for molding. After one season, the pine won't be an upgrade anymore. Dave